Football Soccer Worldcup Penalties for iPhone

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• Expert Rating

  2.00 / 5

• User Rating

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• Price

  $ 1.19 (AUD)

Ross Catanzariti Good Gear Guide 29/03/10 Follow @pcworldau

Pros

• Clean main menu interface

Cons

• Repetitive, lacklustre, poor accuracy on controls, strange team selections, only basic game modes

Bottom Line

We're all for World Cup games on the iPhone, but it's very clear you should give this one a miss. A strange selection of teams, repetitive gameplay and a lack of game modes make this a mediocre game at best. Best avoided.

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At $1.19, Football Soccer Worldcup Penalties is one of the cheapest apps available for the iPhone. First impressions are positive, as the game has a clean and attractive menu interface. You can choose between practice, one player and two player modes, while the career menu displays your overall stats including wins, losses and the number of games played. Scrolling up and down to choose your team is a little oversensitive and we often missed the one we were intending to select.

The game includes 32 teams but not all of the World Cup teams are represented — the likes of Peru, Belgium, Canada, Colombia and India are strange selections, with none competing in the 2010 World Cup. Meanwhile Uruguay, New Zealand, Slovenia and Slovakia, who have all booked plane tickets to South Africa in June, have been left out. The United Kingdom is also a strange inclusion, as England, Scotland and Wales all compete as separate nations under FIFA. Can someone please tell Appontology this isn't the Olympics?

Unfortunately, the game doesn't get much better from here, with no official player names and a basic, boring and extremely repetitive game style. To score a penalty, you flick your finger in the direction you want to shoot, and you use the same method when controlling the goalkeeper to make a save. You can also choose a simpler tap method, but the accuracy using either method isn't great. The commentary is also repetitive, with only two variations of "goooaallll" and the same crowd noise in the background. We think simple games are always best on the iPhone, but this game is just too simple — we were bored after just three penalty kicks.

Aside from single matches and a practice mode (which lets you hone your "skills" hitting targets in the goal), there are no other game modes. At the very least, we were expecting a tournament style, knock-out system, much like the World Cup.

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